I have experience and training in several different approaches to therapy.

Insight Oriented Psychotherapy explores the implications of life experience for new meanings and deeper understandings of your life. Its goal is to integrate new meanings into the bigger picture of your life. In Insight Oriented Psychotherapy, we work together as a team to develop new perspectives about what is causing you to feel stuck, abandoned, blocked or unhappy. We work to integrate your thoughts and your feelings, which can lead you to a sense of personal wholeness and stability, and can help you feel more competent in developing strategies and reaching your goals.

In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, we work to correct distorted and irrational thinking that so often leads to dysfunctional behaviors. In this form of therapy, we will not deal directly with your feelings, although they often self-correct in line with your more rational thinking. This type of therapy can help build self esteem, free you from several types of anxiety, and release you from obsessions that impair your progress to your goals.

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy endeavors to find and understand the complicated patterns of interactions which you repeat in your relationships, and helps you to see the impact of these patterns. Such patterns frequently find their origins in early childhood attachments to caregivers. These attachments build certain beliefs into psychic assumptions which are with us all our lives and often direct our behaviors without our being aware of them. Psychodynamic Therapy helps us to discover these assumptions and decide if they are working in a positive and healthful way for us. It also supports us as we build new assumptions that are more functional and helpful.

Medical Psychotherapy is a special application of talking therapy, where our focus is on your physical illness, your chronic pain, your depression over the loss of your health, your fears about physical deterioration in the future, and not being in control of your body or health. Our goal is not to cure you of your physical condition, but to equip you with more psychological tools to improve how you deal with your difficult life situation. Often people tell me they feel much less alone and more powerful over their disease processes and their lives as a result of this therapy.

And, finally, Psychoanalysis is an intense, long term and unique form of treatment in which you enlist my help as a trained analyst to work at the deepest levels of your psyche. All of the elements of the other therapies play a role in Psychoanalysis, but they are intensified in order to allow for the most profound character change possible. In Psychoanalysis, you would meet with me 4 or 5 times a week and your unconscious is specifically welcomed into our working process. An analysis can take several years, and is a huge investment for both the analysand and the analyst. Much of what has caused the patient pain or trouble in his or her relationships will occur between us, and can be non-judgmentally explored. This is called “transference.” Analysts are especially trained to observe for and work with the transference.

My areas of expertise include
the treatment of:

• Depression
• Grief and loss
• Anxiety
• Anger management
• Trauma, both adult and childhood
• Addiction and dependence
• Impaired creative process
• Misattuned and unempathic communications
• Dysfunctional relationships
• Marital unhappiness
• Difficult parenting
• Stress
• Dysfunctional reactions to ill health
• Adults abused as children
• Post traumatic stress disorder

Susan Brace, RN, PhD, PsyD
6851 Highway 73, Suite 208
Evergreen, CO 80439
303-679-1429
Visits by appointment only